Trial Postponed in Racist Attack Case Against Moroccan Man in France

As soon as the hearing opened, the judge immediately declared himself incompetent to try this case due to the acts qualified as "violence with a weapon" and "racist insults". This is a case that cannot be tried in a single-judge court like the Dole court. The trial has therefore been postponed to Lons-le-Saunier, on June 22. From now on, three judges will be in charge of the case.

The facts had occurred on April 21, in the early afternoon, in front of the home of Adil Sefrioui - an electrical contractor in Dole - located behind the railway station. An altercation had broken out between him and a 72-year-old man from Dole who was standing in front of the fence of his terrace and taking photos. "He immediately said to me ’aaah, bicot, you’re going under the hood today!’ It shocked me. People are usually nice, they tell me ’we don’t like Arabs but we like you’. I have a hard time holding it against them. But this time it was different, I shouted to my wife to call the police," Adil recounted to L’Est Républicain.

Present at the opening of the hearing, the president of SOS Racisme Jura, an association that has joined as a civil party, noted a lot of lightness in the way the police and justice have handled the case. "If Adil Sefrioui had been in the place of the aggressor, today he would be in prison," he assures. For his part, Randall Schwerdorffer, Adil Sefrioui’s lawyer, is asking for an investigating judge to take over the case, for a possible requalification as attempted homicide. As for Patrick Uzan, the new lawyer for the alleged aggressor, he has modified the defense of his client. It is no longer a case of self-defense, but of a "context of reciprocal violence", of which only part is known, through a "truncated" video.